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The Work: Private view

CREATIVE - Leon Jaume, executive creative director, WCRS

February 06, 2009

How long?

4-6 minutes

I have discovered a sure-fire way to take your mind off financial
Armageddon.

Drop a bicycle on your three-month-old baby's head. The bloody graze on
her scalp wipes the credit crunch clean from your thoughts. And negative
equity anxieties melt away under the accusing gaze of the medics in A&E
as they strip your child bare to see what other horrors you may have
been inflicting on her. ("A bicycle!" you can almost catch them
muttering. "That's a good one.")

This isn't necessarily leading anywhere particularly addy - I just can't
stop thinking about it. But knowing this column's merciless intolerance
of irrelevance and feeble non-sequiturs, I should quickly say that if
you are trying to obliterate thoughts of financial doom and you have
neither baby nor bicycle to hand, you could try the T-Mobile (6) ad.

It does what Busby Berkeley did during the Great Depression (soon to be
renamed the First Great Depression): it lifts a nation's spirits through
the medium of dance. It may be shorter than one of Busby's musicals, but
it uses the same size cast. Several hundred people end up
formation-dancing on the Liverpool Street station concourse. It's
part-flashmob, part-West End chorus, and it's utterly brilliant. For the
full effect, and joyfully random soundtrack, you should only watch the
two-minute, 40-second version online. It's a genuine thrill to see such
ambition, planning and risk fully rewarded by the final outcome. There
is the smallest of professional niggles about whether the line "Life's
for sharing" amounts to anything strategically robust, but let's give it
the benefit of the doubt and see what it tries next.

It clearly has a long way to go before it can claim to match the
consistency and cleverness of its most impressive rival in the sector,
O2 (3). On top of good advertising, O2 pulled off the branding coup of
the decade by turning an unloved tarpaulin in the boondocks into a cool
music venue. It has now spread the franchise into the nation's Academies
and has sponsored Channel 4's Skins to promote the tie-up. All very
shrewd and, therefore, all the more disappointing that the idents
themselves are so lame.

Another star pupil is also underperforming this week. The spot for Lynx
Instinct (5) is a curious fusion of two of Bartle Bogle Hegarty's
greatest hits, Levi's "Mr Boombastic" and Lynx's "cavewomen", and ends
up being half as good as each of them. Even the online activity in
support feels a bit half-hearted, and the highlight of it all is
probably the endline: "Unleash the man leather."

Pfizer (4) has made a disgusting cinema ad in which a man regurgitates a
rat after taking drugs he bought online. This is to highlight the point
that dodgily sourced drugs can apparently contain rat poison, but
Pfizer's real concern - that you're not paying them full whack for your
pills - is thinly disguised. It's so unpleasant to watch that you end up
disliking the perpetrators of the ad rather than heeding the warning it
contains.

No such nastiness for Quorn's (2) slight and unmemorable slice of
animation or Vision Express' (1) 118 118-style twins with giant eyes
instead of heads working out in a gym to promote their thorough eye
tests.

The most notable thing about both campaigns is that you'd never know by
looking at them that the consumer world is in collapse. So let's be
clear. If you work in advertising, your hour has come. No-one really
needs you in the good times when people are flinging money around, but
now is the time to show the world how clever and visionary you really
are. As charismatic American leaders are back in vogue, let's paraphrase
one to give us a motto to work by: ask not what your accounts can
generate for you, ask what you can generate for your accounts. Good day
and good luck.

PLANNER - Dylan Williams, strategy director, Mother

I'm going to need some new material. I've been getting by with a chart
that says "From Me To We" for ages. I normally set up the Friedmanite
delusion that our economic meltdown is simply a "market correction",
before contending that something more fundamental is afoot. Like a ...
"social correction". A rejection of the Age of The Individual and the
emergence of a new spirit of collectivism and community. It sounds good
and it stacks up. Thirty years of growth in personal disposable income
inversely co-related to personal happiness, fulfilment and well-being?
I've given worse PowerPoint. But every strategist has a version of "From
Me To We" now. Moreover, the really good ones have been making stuff off
the back of it. Like helping T-Mobile (6) make a film so timely and
feel-good that more than two million people have actively sought it out
for themselves. I really like this. I prefer it to Improv Everywhere's
frozen flashmob last year. That felt like Situationists looking to spook
people. This performance just left folk cheering.

I'm not so keen on Pfizer (4)'s attempt to shock people into getting
their drugs exclusively from nice companies like it. Does it honestly
think that the Chemical Generation is bothered by a little rat poison in
their Viagra? These are the people whose formative years were spent
watching their parents snuggle into the reassuring arms of Valium
addiction. The same people that danced their way through the next two
decades on anything that tasted revolting or made their nose bleed.
They're not going to jump out of their cinema seats at the sight of some
old boy hoying a rat out of his mouth.

Benefit laddering is the lazy strategist's tool of choice. It's helped a
succession of brands elevate beyond the drudgery of product benefits to
achieve some higher purpose. Up on the ladder, detergent becomes a badge
of maternal care. Cosmetics become hope. The downside of this approach
is that it can encourage delusionary levels of self-importance. Chewing
gum as social lubricant was pushing it. But I look at this Vision
Express (1) spot and I can't help wondering whether it might be worth
getting the ladder out. We're dealing with sight here. The brand has the
word Vision in its name. There's got to be more potential than two
eyeballs having a supervised gym workout.

You can't knock O2 (3). It works. Media fragmentation? Glue it all
together with consistent design principles and get a cumulative effect.
Turn invisible service brands into tangible positive experiences. Sort
the Dome out. And now the Academy chain. Nothing fancy. But effective.
It's easier to say nice things about the campaign in aggregate than any
of the specific parts, but that's the O2 way. So while I'm not belly
laughing at blokes playing air guitar in these Skins idents (it just
didn't happen round my way), I can appreciate their role in the brand's
wider plan.

I'm struggling with Quorn (2). And it's not really its fault. I love the
animation style. It's just that when you begin a VO with the word
"Because", you immediately set me up to be convinced by logical
argument. And that line of persuasion is not going to work when the old
"... as part of a balanced diet and active lifestyle" caveat appears
halfway through.

Finally, the launch of Lynx Instinct (5). This one combines the brand's
familiar promise with the colour and fragrance cues of the new variant.
And all wrapped up in the intriguing concept of "man leather". And it's
fine. But you can't help but feel that the brand needs to reveal a new
facet of its character. Perhaps a new perspective on the mating game?
Lynx is at its best when it does this. I wonder how the brand would
approach something like teenage pregnancy?

Anyway, all in all, I enjoyed this batch. I'm a bit worried about
Saatchi & Saatchi, though. It's getting good again.